Hero Shifts: 6.81 After One Day [Link]

Since I’ve made my usual mistake of reading the comments sections, here’s some bonus ranting.

No, the sample size is not too small. Yesterday used roughly 700k games. Today Dotabuff is at 1.4 million. There are other unavoidable issues that, while they do not invalidate this exercise, are still worth keeping in mind:

Popularity Trends. Keeper of the Light was used in only 5.73% of 6.80 games. Yesterday he was used in 13.67%, the second largest net shift between patch rates after “Gonna Rush an Aghs” compatriot Lich. He has 169,804 games played in 6.81 and 104,202 Aghanim’s Scepters built, for a Scepter completion rate of over 60%. I do not believe these trends will hold, and when they stop holding it is likely they will alter his win rate.

Unfamiliarity Driving Failure. As I mentioned, people in general do not yet understand how Tusk’s new snowball, Zeus’ Lightning Bolt vision, or Ursa’s itemization options. More time for knowledge to spread here will drive future shifts, not a mere increase in sample size.

No Bracket/MMR information. Most of this is from Normal games because Normal games are the largest part of the distribution. Very High may be taking certain changes differently.

I also apparently need to blingee the heading “Small or Statistically Insignificant.” Complaining about mentioning Keeper of the Light in regards to 6.81 patch changes might be the single dumbest reddit comment I’ve ever triggered.

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One Response to Hero Shifts: 6.81 After One Day [Link]

The WK change is most easily explained by the change shifting perception of him away from what he’s a good at (supporting) towards a category he’s still sub-par at (carrying).

There’s no refuting that he has a godly stun at early levels, enough to be the envy of most roamers, what’s much less clear is how useful his aura and crit actually are for carrying since he’s generally even easier than Naix to kite and doesn’t have an inbuilt BKB to help compensate and allow a racecar build. The ultimate as well is not well understood in terms of it’s effect on his carrying. To get the most out of it, you want to position in a way that it’s going to trigger that ungodly slow on a lot of people at a time when your team can maximise counterinitiation, but that means he’s uniquely unable to actually add his farm into that portion of the battle. Using it as a straight aegis is vulnerable to lots of easy and popular counters like EMP and Necrobooks.

My gut feeling is that his winrate is driven by games where he isn’t played as a traditional position 1, either playing as a very aggressive early support who bounces back off easy farm or as a safelane farmer who goes into items that foster early aggression like blink. In this context, something that encourages a lot of players to play him as a straight carry as well as encourage a lot of players who don’t really understand the hero to pick him up would undermine his winrate.